Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash A Reflection for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time There are ideas, and then there are people. Ideas are supposed to cover people, but they never quite do. Concepts tend to be clear cut, easy to distinguish. People almost never are. The point of having a notion is possessing something stable. The point of being a person is having the ability to change. Consider, for example, the discrepancy between liberty as a notion and real life among American revolutionary patriots. During the winter of 1775-1776, Massachusetts soldiers taunted and hurled snowballs at Virginia riflemen until a thousand men erupted in a massive brawl. A soldier recalled “biting and gouging on the one part, and knockdown on the other with as much apparent fury as the most deadly enemy could create.”